22 June 2017:Bodø, Norway: You, Too?

Located on a peninsula in the Norwegian Sea, Bodø is one of Norway’s windiest cities. And cold. And with two months of sunless days, and two months of nothing but sun.

We’re arriving close to the peak of the Midnight Sun season.

Silver Wind at the dock in Bødo, which is pronounced Boo-duh, more or less.

It’s a remote and relatively unknown place, although it had a few close brushes with history.

Six weeks after Norway was invaded by Germany, most of Bodø was destroyed by a Luftwaffe attack on May 27, 1940. Why? Because the Allies had begun work on an airfield there.

And then 20 years later, in May of 1960, an airplane departed an U.S. air station near Peshawar in Pakistan. It was due to land in Bodø, Norway.

That’s a rather unusual route, and this was not your basic airplane.

This was a U-2 spy plane, and its flight path was intended to be the first attempt to fly all the way across the Soviet Union, deeper into Russia than the Americans had ever gone.

The U-2 plane, a most unusual design, was capable of flying as high as 75,000 feet above the earth, nearly 15 miles up. That was higher than any Soviet plane of the time could fly, and thought to be out of reach of antiaircraft weaponry.

The U-2 was armed not with bombs or missiles but instead with many cameras capable of high-resolution photography.

The pilot was Francis Gary Powers.

And you may also remember that the Soviets somehow managed to shoot the U-2 out of the sky with a flurry of 14 surface-to-air missiles.

The airport at Bodø has been used for various secret and not-so-secret purposes in its history. Today, in addition to commercial flights, it is part of a NATO cold weather training center.

NEPAL IN NORWAY

On this visit I went with the guests a group of guests on a strenuous hike up Keiservarden, the tallest local mountain. The hill, about 600 meters or so but rather steep, was renamed in honor of Kaiser Wilhelm in the early 1900s. Wilhelm was a regular visitor to Norway at the time.

The trail was challenging and I can only imagine what it was like before it was improved a few years ago by a set of Nepalese experts.

As always, I carried my pack of cameras and lenses. As I write these words my knees are reminding me of the morning stroll.

All photos and text Copyright 2017 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.

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